ellauri042.html on line 717: Dostoevsky´s illness influenced some peculiarities of his writing, his language and style. Dostoevsky´s bad memory was well known; he had to take notes for everything His language is nervous, tense and impulsive. His phrases are sometimes long and complicated, containing a fanciful conglomeration of colloquial words and expressions, official, journalistic and scientific terms, and slips of the tongue, foreign words, names and quotations. But now and then we can see here very short, elliptic phrases.
ellauri097.html on line 155: If chemists were similarly given to fanciful and mystical guessing, they would have hatched a quantum theory forty years ago to account for the variations that they observed in atomic weights. But they kept on plugging away in their laboratories without calling in either mathematicians or theologians to aid them, and eventually they discovered the isotopes, and what had been chaos was reduced to the most exact sort of order.
ellauri151.html on line 267: The finest virtues can become deformed with age. The precise mind becomes finicky; the thrifty man, miserly; the cautious man, timorous; the man of imagination, fanciful. Even perseverance ends up in a sort of stupidity. Moi, je sais.
ellauri321.html on line 123: But Crèvecoeur was after all a Frenchman, with the strong social instinct of his race. And so he proceeds to analyze and define the political conditions of America. It fills him with a quiet but deep satisfaction to be one of a community of “freeholders, the possessors of the soil they cultivate, members of the government they obey, and the framers of their own laws by means of their representatives.” Thus he rises to a consideration of this new type of social man and seeks to answer the question: What xx What is an American? His answer is delightful literature, but fanciful sociology. Had the colonial farmers all been Crèvecoeurs, had they all possessed his ideality, his power of raising simple things into true human dignity, of connecting the homeliest activity with the ultimate social purpose which it furthers in its own small way, his description of the American would have been fair enough. As a matter of fact, the hard-working colonial farmer, cut off from the refining and subduing influences of an older civilization, was probably no very delectable type, however worthy, and one fears that Professor Wendell is right in declaring that Crèvecoeur's American is no more human than some ideal savage of Voltaire. But in this fact lies much of the literary charm of his work, and of its value as a human document of the age of the Revolution.
xxx/ellauri416.html on line 722: El means "God" in the Ugaritic and the Canaanite languages. The literal meaning of Shaddai, however, is the subject of debate. Some scholars have argued that it came from Akkadian shadû ("mountain") or from the Hebrew verb shaddad שדד meaning "Destroyer". Shaddai may have also come from shad שד meaning mammary; shaddai is a typical Biblical Hebrew word (שדי). The plural (Shaddayim -- שדיים) is the typical Modern Hebrew word for human breasts in dual grammatical number.The Deir Alla Inscription contains shaddayin as well as elohin rather than elohim. Scholars translate this as "shadday-gods," taken to mean unspecified boobs, mountain or destroyer gods. A popular interpretation of the name Shaddai is that it is composed of the Hebrew relative particle she- (Shin plus vowel segol followed by dagesh), or, as in this case, as sha- (Shin plus vowel patach followed by a dagesh). The noun containing the dagesh is the Hebrew word dai meaning "enough, sufficient, sufficiency". However, Day's overview says a "rabbinic view understanding the name meaning 'who suffices' (Se + day) is clearly fanciful and has no support."
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